A blast from the past!

Thanks to Michael Bonkowski – the person who commissioned the Atari 800 laptop – I now have an Atari 1050 disk drive!

As some of you may know the Atari 800 was my first computer at age 11 (myself, not the computer). Sure even then it was fairly old, but still awesome. Over the years I programmed (or tried to program) many a game for it in BASIC. While the hobby never really accomplished much at the time, I give the experience a lot of credit for the computer knowledge I have today.

Several years ago I bought an SIO2PC cable, which allows you to hook up your Atari to a PC and use the PC as a virtual disk drive. You can play disk images off your PC, or make images of your original floppies. That was all well and good, but my Atari 810 disk drive failed shortly after getting this cable. So I didn’t manage to copy much.

But now thanks to Michael I can finally back up those old disks and realize just many games I never finished! However what was somewhat complete or playable has been made into ATR disk images and you can check them out here.

Should be good for a laugh, enjoy!

4 thoughts on “A blast from the past!”

  1. Love your work Ben. The Atari was my first as well. Still wish I had my drives and other hardware I’d let you have them (I had two drives…one with a Happy installed and the other with a mod-read/write switch and speed increase). I also ran a BBS for awhile as well from it. It was also Sparta-Dos that made it easy for me to enter the IBM world later in life….ah the memories…thanks Ben.

  2. I had one of these! I only got rid of it 5 years ago. I should have kept my 800XLs and drives, and my two STs.

    Ben – your mods are pretty awesome – and the blog is great.

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